Then I heard another big voice say, “Don’t worry; don’t worry,” and suddenly the enemy started shooting from behind us. I saw fire in the air; I saw bodies being torn apart. I heard women and children screaming, but I didn’t see or hear my friend. I thought he was one of the victims. With no hope for survival, I hid underneath an abandoned truck that was next to me. As I crouched underneath that truck, listening to the gunfire all around me, I laughed to myself when I realized that four years earlier, when I was only twenty, I had never seen a gun since even soldiers did not carry them before the war. Soon my reverie changed as things went from bad to worse. Suddenly, they started shooting the truck. At that moment, I thought I was going to die. I said my “last prayer” for God to receive me into his hands. But He did not receive me then, and I AM ALIVE. Each morning when I look at myself in the mirror and see the scar on my head from the bullet which grazed my skull, I marvel that I am alive. Over 800,000 people from my country of Rwanda were killed in 1994 during the genocide, while numerous others continued to be exterminated through 2000--but I survived.
François is a high school Spanish teacher in Wisconsin, USA, who lived in many countries and speaks many languages. He speaks Spanish, French, English, and Kinyarwanda. He also speaks an intermediate level of Swahili. Part of his family still lives in France, and the other lives in Belgium. He lived in the African countries of Senegal, Congo, Zaire, and Rwanda, and the Europeans countries of Spain, France, and Belgium before becoming a US citizen. he has also spent time in Italy, Holland, and the Ivory Coast. He is married and father of two.
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